Staycation

This weekend Ben and I are heading away sans baby. Except we’re not really going anywhere. (Aren’t we an exciting pair eh?)

A while back, we decided that we wanted to get away. We’d actually budgeted for a trip to NYC/Boston for this fall that for various reasons didn’t end up happening. So we had this trip money already set aside, my time not working is quickly coming to a close, and Ben happens to be turning 30 on Sunday. All of these seemed to be great reasons to splurge on a little getaway. My parents generously agreed to take Ellie for the weekend (although, let’s be honest, it wasn’t THAT difficult to get them to agree :)), and so we had great plans of heading up north to a romantic Muskoka B&B, or go stateside and check out a town we’d never been to before.

And then we just kept not planning our trip. We never seemed to be in the mood to scour the internet for a great place to visit, and when we realized that this weekend was American Thanksgiving, we really didn’t feel like crossing the border along with thousands of other people. (I can probably think of at least 600 other things I’d rather do than get trampled as people raced for a cheap TV to go along with the other 3 TV’s already in their house.) (How’s THAT for a broad sweeping generalization of Americans for you?)

And we both started to really like the idea of a stay-cation. We live so close to Toronto, and hardly ever take advantage of that fact, and normally, we can’t justify spending tons of money on great restaurants, of which there are many near by. So that’s what we’re going to do. It’s kind of fun to splurge with money you’ve already set aside and not very often in my anal-retentive world to I not worry about how much things are costing us. So this should be fun!

We’re dropping Ellie off tomorrow afternoon and high-tailing it to a hotel 45 minutes from our very own bed. It does seem a little funny to be doing that, but hey- that’s what staycations are for. Plus, hotels are just fun. You can jump on the bed, go hot tubbing, eat ice cream in your bed while wearing a white robe…all good things.

We have so many fun things planned and I’ve compiled a handy little list of some of those things, for your reading pleasure:

Sleeping the HECK in. (I can’t really complain, Ellie has resumed her sleeping in ways and we really do get lots of sleep with her, but, still)

Dilly-dally to our hearts content and only start getting ready for wherever it is we’re going maybe 30 minutes in advance, because we don’t have a baby to think about/pack for.

See a movie. (This is the one thing I really miss about our pre-kid days. Not that we are avid movie-goers, but has really been the only thing we haven’t been able to do on a whim. You can’t really take a baby in there with you)

Eat at several different restaurants, most of which would usually be out of our price range. (That makes us sound like we’re going to be blowing biiiiiig bucks on meals. We’re not. Don’t worry, our “price range” is usually quite modest)

See War Horse. (We really wanted to see a production and there aren’t any out right now except this one. All I can say is that it had BETTER be more interesting than the movie, or I’ll be ticked. Still…always fun to get dressed up and see a play)

Fight the crazy traffic of people in T.O this weekend for the Grey Cup (*sigh. We didn’t really think that one through when we first planned our staycation)

Go up the CN Tower and finally fight the stereotype that you never do the “touristy” things in your own city. Here we go!

Probably eat street meat. Oh sweet street meat. I love that stuff. And really, it’s not hard to convince Ben that it’ a good idea to eat a sausage on the street.